The articles in this issue
of19all respond to the contention that, in
nineteenth-century science and culture, to read a body was to replicate it.
Medical practitioners collaborated with artists to produce new kinds of
anatomical models which resembled the body with uncanny accuracy, while
prosthetics mimicked body parts with unprecedented similitude.

At
the same time, zoology as a body of knowledge became increasingly associated
with replicating the likenesses of living animals through taxidermy. While
earlier animal stuffing had1 often
been relatively crude, naturalist-taxidermists such as John Hancock used new
mounting techniques and extensive field observation to create displays which
appeared to freeze live animals in motion.2The
period also witnessed new efforts to capture and replicate bodies’ varying
attitudes and motions through visual technologies. Although this effect would
be most fully achieved in cinematography, it was pursued much earlier through
collections and sequences of static images. InEssays on
the Anatomy of Expression in Painting(1806), anatomist Charles
Bell used drawings of faces contorted into different emotional expressions to
illustrate the muscular variability of the human countenance. Charles
Darwin’sThe Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals(1872)
would build on this work, reproducing photographs of people and animals in
various expressive attitudes. In the 1870s and 1880s, Eadweard Muybridge and
Étienne-Jules Mary developed forms of stop-motion photography that replicated
animals’ split-second movements in a sequence of stills. In the same period,
the emergence of the phonograph replicated human voices, enabling investigators
like Edward Wheeler Scripture to slow them down in order to analyses the
phonetic minutiae of speech.3Artificially
replicating bodies and their activities offered new ways of understanding them,
generating knowledge as well as demonstrating it.

Organic
bodies were also viewed as vehicles for mimicry. Philosophers since Aristotle
had claimed that humans possessed an innate tendency to mimic each other.4However,
it was not until the late eighteenth century that philosophers such as J. G. H.
Feder in Germany systematically postulated an ‘imitation drive’, possibly
shared between humans and animals.5Edmund
Burke similarly identified an innate ‘desire of imitating’, which ‘forms our
manners, our opinions, our lives’. Yet this process was purely physiological,
he claimed, occurring ‘without any intervention of the reasoning faculty’.6The
body’s apparent tendencies towards imitation conflicted with ideals of
individualism, both in the Romantic sense of originality and self-realization
and the liberal sense of the individual as a political-economic free agent.7It
was perhaps for this reason that imitation in the nineteenth century was
frequently associated with primitive mindlessness. Darwin noted ‘a strong
tendency to imitation, independently of the conscious will’ in humans and
argued that this tendency was discernible in other primates.8By
the turn of the twentieth century, the American psychologist James Mark Baldwin
was describing the child as ‘a veritable copying machine’.9Similarly,
the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde conceptualized imitation as the ‘social’
expression of a universal law of ‘repetition’ which occurred throughout the
organic world via heredity.10This
sense that mimicry was a natural law was reinforced by studies into bodily
resemblances between different species across the animal kingdom. In the early
nineteenth century, the entomologist William Sharp Macleay argued that such
‘analogies’ between unrelated insects occurred in interlinking patterns,
reflecting the exquisite symmetry of the creation.11Later,
Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace posited the concept of ‘protective
mimicry’, by which animals evolved to resemble other species which were
unpalatable or otherwise defended against predators.12Bodies
seemed naturally formed to replicate each other.

This
issue explores how nineteenth-century representations of bodies as objects and subjects
of replication interacted with wider concerns about authenticity, epistemology,
identity, and animal/human, nature/culture binaries. As in current times,
‘replication’ signified repetition or reproduction, reflecting its Latin and
French derivations. Yet the word was also used to signify echoing and replying,
connotations which are useful for considering the ambiguities of mimicking
bodies and bodily mimicry.13In
his suggestive study of ‘the copy’ in western modernity, Hillel Schwartz
observed that ‘the more adroit we are at carbon copies, the more confused we
are about the unique, the original, the Real McCoy’.14 Anatomical
models and images and taxidermic specimens problematized the dichotomy between
original and copy as they sought not only to replicate specific bodies but to
represent ideal types that supposedly lay behind individual examples. Further,
while organic bodies existed in constant flux, both physically moving around
and passing through cycles of growth, senescence, and decay, artificial
replications gave such bodies an impossible stasis. Such objects were thus
sometimes characterized, paradoxically, by theirunlikenessto the bodies they replicated,
revealing minute details which were unobservable upon living, moving bodies. In
these ways, artificial efforts to mimic organic bodies raised questions about
the dynamics of representation and reflected diverging attitudes towards it in
science and art. Similarly, human tendencies to mimicry undermined notions of
personality as internal and essential. Identities seemed increasingly
constituted by their relations with others. Views of imitation as primitive and
animal clashed with psychological theories that placed it at the center of
learning and selfhood. Mimicry might both reinforce distinctions between
savagery and civilization, and collapse them.

Uncanny replications

Mimicry
also escaped these naturalistic contexts to go to work in stranger ways, as an
aspect of what psychoanalysts would later call the uncanny. Ernst Jentsch (and
later Sigmund Freud) defined this term as a state of psychological discomfort
associated (among other things) with the blurring of boundaries between the
animate and inanimate. Building on this idea, more recent researchers have
posited an ‘uncanny valley’, a hypothetical threshold on a scale of human
likeness at which objects incur eeriness and revulsion.15Although
nineteenth-century authors lacked this psychoanalytic hermeneutic, many were
sensitive to the potentially disorientating effects of objects replicating the
appearance of animate bodies. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ (1816) (which
Jentsch and Freud both used to illustrate the uncanny) famously depicted the
mechanical automaton Olympia, with whom the protagonist of the story falls in
love, believing it to be a woman. Similarly, in Charles Dickens’sThe Old Curiosity Shop(1841), the travelling show-woman
Mrs. Jarley declares her human waxworks so like life, that if wax-work only
spoke and walked about, you’d hardly know the difference. I won’t go so far as
to say, that, as it is, I’ve seen wax-work quite like life, but I’ve certainly
seen some life that was exactly like wax-work.16

Mrs.
Jarley’s paradox emphasizes the dizzyingtrompe l’oeilwhich
waxworks could create, momentarily upsetting the apparent relationship between
organic original and artificial copy. Stuffed animals could be equally
unnerving, as Verity Darke discusses in her article on taxidermy in
Dickens’sOur Mutual Friend(1865).
Darke notes that Dickens’s description of such objects as ‘paralytically animated’
highlights how they blurred the boundaries between life and death, nature and
artifice.

The
tendencies of live bodies to resemble and seem to replicate each other also
furnished rich material for uncanny narrative in the period. We might think of
the mysterious doppelgänger who torments the protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe’s
‘William Wilson’ (1839). The protagonist is vexed to find himself and his
classmate ‘of the same height’ and ‘singularly alike in general contour of
person and outline of feature’. Recognizing the double’s striking resemblance
to him, the narrator feels ‘possessed with an objectless yet intolerable
horror’.17Later,
bodily resemblances similarly confused identities in the work of Thomas Hardy,
who exploited uncertainties about heredity to conjure weird moments of
doubling. In his short story ‘An Imaginative Woman’ (1894), the protagonist
Ella bears a son who looks remarkably like a poet whom she was once obsessed
with but never met. The coincidence causes her husband to wrongly imagine that
the child is not his. ‘By a known but inexplicable trick of nature’, the
narrator states, ‘there were undoubtedly strong traces of resemblance […]; the
dreamy and peculiar expression of the poet’s face sat, as the transmitted idea,
upon the child’s.’18The
tale evokes old notions of ‘maternal impressions’ which assumed that children
could be influenced by sensory stimuli experienced by their mothers during
pregnancy.19By
the end of the century, such Lamarckian heredity was increasingly disputed,
following August Weismann’s studies which suggested that parents’ individual
experiences did not affect the hereditary information they transmitted.20However,
the idea that ancestral features were passed across generations unchanged could
have equally uncanny implications, producing eerie likenesses across time. The
speaker in one of Hardy’s poems fancies that he sees ‘my mien, and build, and
brow’ mirrored in an endless line of predecessors, causing him to despair: ‘I
am merest mimicker and counterfeit!’.21Hardy’s
vision of an immortal family face evokes the search for types behind individual
bodies in anatomical models and images and in the composite portraits of
Francis Galton which combined mug shots of convicts to depict typical
‘criminal’ features.22In
such materialist science, the body represented not the shell of a metaphysical
soul but the basis of character, suggesting that physical resemblances might
correlate with moral, psychological ones.

Even
uncannier was the birth of identical siblings, although their resemblances
could signify different meanings through the period. Early in the century,
storytellers often presented twins’ visible likenesses as misleading, since
different life experiences produced different characters.23Hence,
Susan Ferrier’sMarriage(1818) depicts twin
sisters who are raised by different mistresses and, consequently, diverge in
their personalities, one becoming sensible and dutiful and the other reckless
and immoral. This pattern is repeated in Madeline Leslie’sThe Twin Brothers(1843) as the twin protagonists
receive a religious and irreligious upbringing respectively, leading one to
become an upstanding citizen and the other a criminal. Later in the century,
however, twins increasingly came to symbolize the power of heredity to
replicate personalities irrespective of environment. Having surveyed the
families of many twins, Galton argued that twins’ habits, dispositions, and
even lifespans were mostly remarkably similar, as though they were ‘keeping
time like two watches’.24Grant
Allen would use this image in his story ‘The Two Carnegies’ (1885) in which
twin brothers echo each other in all of their actions and life experiences,
albeit with a two-week delay. One brother declares, ‘We’re like two clocks
wound up to strike at fixed moments’, and his assessment is confirmed at the
end of the tale when the brothers die from the same illness a fortnight apart.25These
examples show how twins could be made to symbolize the primacy of both biology
and environment, both the depth of bodily replication and its superficiality.

Uncanny
resemblances also derived from humans’ abilities to consciously mimic each
other’s appearances. In ‘William Wilson’, the protagonist finds himself
mirrored through skilful imitation as well as physical similarities. Of his
disturbing double, Wilson laments, ‘my gait and general manner were, without
difficulty, appropriated; […] even my voice did not escape him’ (Poe, p. 281).
The anxiety that bodily mimicry could falsify identities was fuelled through
the century by widely publicized cases of imposture, such as the pretended
baronet Roger Tichborne.cThe
shift to a credit-based economy that loosened class boundaries and the
anonymity of modern urban life generated new interest in and concern about
individuals posing as people that they were not. William Brewer notes that, in
the Romantic period, ‘numerous tales about criminal chameleons appeared in the
periodical press’, which ‘condemned the mendacity and criminality of imposters
while praising the culprits’ acting skills, apparel, handsomeness, charm, and
gentility. Courtrooms, prison cells, and scaffolds became stages on which
protean swindlers performed before appreciative onlookers.’27The
persistence of these theatrical associations with chameleon criminality can be
seen near the end of the century in Grant Allen’s novelAn African Millionaire(1896), which follows the
shape-shifting con man Colonel Clay. Clay repeatedly defrauds the mining
magnate Sir Charles Vandrift by changing his appearance to look like a
succession of different people (including even Sir Charles himself). A former
maker of waxwork figures, Clay is said to use his technical skills ‘to mound
his own nose and cheeks, with wax additions to the character he desires to
personate.’28The
disorientating effect of such mimicry is highlighted when Clay is finally
caught and put on trial, with the prosecution case consisting of proving that
the man in the dock is the same as Clay’s various incarnations. Yet, when Sir
Charles asserts that he was defrauded by a man posing as a parson, whose
photograph is shown to the court, Clay draws attention to another man in the
middle of the court. Turning around, Sir Charles is startled to see a parson
who ‘was — to all outer appearance — the Reverend Richard Barbizonin propria persona’ (p. 304). The parson in the court
turns out to be an accomplice, on whom Clay modelled his disguise, and Clay’s
identity is finally proved through comparisons of photographs of his different
personas. Nonetheless, his misdirection of the court testifies to the dizzying
effect of contrived bodily resemblance.

A similar
sense of confusion, of reality losing its stable coordinates, runs through Jane
Goodall’s article, which probes the complex relationship between bodily mimicry
and the uncanny. This theme is pursued through a discussion of the Gothic genre
and the history of theatre. Goodall shows how fascination with ghosts and other
supernatural visions in the period dovetailed with developing ideas in
psychology that conceived of the human mind as ‘haunted’ in various ways, such
as by dim memories of ancestral experience. In this context, Goodall suggests,
the figure of the uncanny double served to express ‘pre-Freudian insights into
how the mind hides things from itself’. Bodily replication could present the
original in a new light, discovering previously unknown divisions and
pluralities.

More real than life

The
notion that replication was revelatory, defamiliarizing the original,
underpinned the logic of many scientific efforts to mimic organic bodies in the
period. Anatomical models displayed normally unperceived structures and details
through their stasis and permanence, which enabled close-up, protracted
scrutiny. Carin Berkowitz comments that wax models offered ‘a way of "seeing”
systems of barely visible anatomical parts with clarity, away from the
messiness of the body’. By seeking ‘to hold nature still’, such objects ‘served
as an intermediate between nature and representation’, replicating organic
bodies in all of their (usually unseen) details.29Artificially
replicating bodies did not necessarily result in atrompe l’oeilbut could, conversely, make bodies
strange by altering their normal conditions of visibility. This point is
highlighted in Kristin Hussey’s review of Joseph Towne’s medical waxworks at
the Gordon Museum of Pathology in London, works which captured the subtle
differences in colour and texture of various skin diseases. Similarly, through
their temporality, photographs promised to make visible details of bodies that
normally went unremarked. Hence, Darwin’s images of faces variously contorted
seemed to capture bodies’ fleeting emotional states (even though, in reality,
these expressions were staged rather than spontaneous).30Muybridge
and Marey’s quick-fire photographs revealed aspects of movement which escaped
the eye in real time, such as the ways in which animals ambulated and rolled
over in mid-air so as to land on their feet.31Artificially
replicated bodies could seem more substantial than the bodies they mimicked.

This
inversion of the traditional logic of mimesis caused some medical investigators
to imagine such technologies as means of capturing personalities as well as
physical bodies. The mid-century alienist Hugh Welch Diamond claimed to have
treated delusional patients by photographing them and then showing them the
photographs to restore their sense of self.32In
a reversal of the conventional dichotomy between organic authenticity and
artificial replication, living bodies were encouraged to replicate their
likenesses. Treena Warren’s contribution to this issue examines how Victorian
medical photography sought to capture and store permanently bodies in various
stages of disease and recovery. Warren notes that the medium’s association with
portraiture shaped the way in which patients were imaged, appearing as
individuals in a specific ‘social context’ rather than as isolated body parts.
Again, the replication could seem more substantial than the original, since the
latter changed constantly while the model or portrait remained the same. This
impression that artificial bodily replications could, perhaps, preserve
personalities (or aspects of them) better than the bodies they inhabited was
reinforced by the secularization of psychology, as the discipline emphasized
the corporeal basis of mind.33Walter
Pater famously characterized human life as a ‘continual vanishing away’ and a
‘strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves’.34In
contrast to this unstable ontology, the artificial likeness represented an
impossible bodily permanence, symbolized in Oscar Wilde’sA Picture of Dorian Gray(1890). Wilde’s
protagonist acquires the unchanging, youthful features of his painting while
the image on canvas becomes decayed and distorted over the years. His iconic
story shows the slippage between bodies and their artificial replications that
had been long recognized in medicine permeating popular culture.

Anatomical
human models further defamiliarized bodies by dividing them into pieces and peeling
back tissue to expose internal organs. As Corinna Wagner explores in her
article, the removable layers of medical waxworks encouraged anatomists and
artists to rethink the relationship between bodily interior and exterior. As
models evolved over time, they defamiliarized the human body in line with
changing norms of representation. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have shown
how notions of ‘truth-to-nature’, which caused earlier investigators to
represent natural objects in accordance with ideals of symmetry and perfection,
were progressively supplanted by efforts to ‘let nature speak for itself’.35Instead
of ‘correcting’ the individual variations of specimens, anatomical images and
models strove more to reproduce them with minute accuracy.36While
earlier models claimed to replicate bodily ideals never found in reality,
others of the mid- to late nineteenth century disorientated the viewer by
diverging from conventional bodily representation, depicting strange,
pathological abnormalities. This change is reflected in the photographs of
diseased bodies discussed by Warren and in Joseph Towne’s waxworks. Hussey,
discussing the latter, notes that by faithfully replicating the diseased body
parts of individuals, sometimes of different racial heritages, Towne’s models
‘bring a sense of the diverse community of hospital patients’. Medical waxworks
drew attention to the changeability, variety, and hidden depths of the human
body.

Such
innovations promised not only to advance scientific knowledge but also to reset
aesthetic values. The anatomist John Marshall wrote in a book aimed at artists,
‘the beauty of the human form […] does not by any means reside entirely in its
superficial covering, but it depends essentially on that of the structures
situated beneath the integument.’37Bell
had promoted his studies of expressive physiology as an aid to artists, and
painters such as William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti studied anatomy
in order to reproduce the structures of human tissue with striking ‘mimetic
accuracy’.38While
earlier commentators had understood artistic imitation as ‘a selective,
idealizing process which communicates the potential best of nature’, the
nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin emphasized fidelity to nature’s ‘infinite
variety’.39Yet
Wagner shows that ‘aesthetics of anatomical realism’ also provoked revulsion
for some commentators, who insisted that bodily beauty consisted in the
separation of outside from inside. Further, replicating organic bodies with too
much precision was also sometimes attacked as a degradation of art, reducing it
to a mere mechanical activity bereft of aesthetic judgement or feeling. Ruskin
railed against mechanized imitation of nature as mindless, claiming that
‘science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves’, while the
arts were concerned with ‘the appearance of things’ and ‘the natural impression
which they produce upon living creatures’.40The
anatomist mightknowa body by replicating its
form precisely in wax or papier mâché, but, in Ruskin’s terms, he did notseeit. Such rhetoric in art criticism cohered
with emerging discourses of objectivity which celebrated the supposed
unartfulness of science, its imitations being systematic rather than intuitive
(Daston and Galison, pp. 124–35).

The
association between the replication of bodies and critical distance is also
discernible in nineteenth-century theories of acting, which revolved around the
replication of emotional expressions. The critic G. H. Lewes commented that the
actor could only convincingly represent emotions which he had personally
experienced: by calling these feelings to mind, he also produced their natural
expressions. Yet, simultaneously, the actor was alienated from these bodily
emotions, observing them with cool, intellectual detachment. As Lewes wrote,
‘he is a spectator of his own tumult; and though moved by it, can yet so master
it as to select from it only those elements which best suit his purpose.’41Lewes’s
split between the actor’s artistic intellect and the partly involuntary
expressions of the body highlights the ontological uncertainty of acting. The
actor entrances audiences by being simultaneously himself and someone else, at
once contrived and authentic.42

The issue
of authenticity was further complicated by audiences’ emotional reactions,
which theorists also regarded as a kind of involuntary mimicry. Alexander Bain
observed that ‘we are capable of entering into the situation of the actors, of
becoming invested for the time with their mode of excitement’.43Edmund
Burke and Charles Bell had suggested that imitating expressions of emotion
aroused the associated emotions in the imitator.44Bain
further suggested that there was in humans ‘a tendency to put on the very
expression that we witness, and, in so doing, to assume the mental condition
itself’ (pp. 173–74). This logic of mimetic spectatorship was woven through
Darwin’sExpression of the Emotions, which cited anecdotes of
audiences mirroring the gestures of performers through unconscious sympathy.45The
text also repeatedly invited readers to copy the expressions described and
depicted in photographs. As Tiffany Watt Smith comments, ‘The Expressionworks as a theatrical machine […].
Darwin issues stage directions, tantalizing and explicit requests that his
readers artificially reproduce emotions’ (p. 77). Goodall notes that ideas of
the human body being somehow primed to replicate emotions signaled by other
bodies prefigures concepts in recent psychology of ‘mirror neurons’, by which
people’s brains echo the ey, 24 vols.

5.August Weismann,Essays Upon Heredity and
Kindred Biological Problems, trans. by A. E. Shipley and Selmar
Schönland, ed. by Edward B. Poulton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889). See Laura
Otis,Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and
Early Twentieth Centuries(Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1994), pp. 47–49.

27. On the blurred lines between
authenticity and theatricality in the period, see Lynn M. Voskuil,Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity(Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2004).

41. Frederic William Farrar,On the Origin of Language(London: Murray, 1860),
p. 75. On the cultural history of ideas of language evolution, see Christine
Ferguson,Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the
Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue(Aldershot: Ashgate,
2006); Gregory Radick,The Simian Tongue: The Long
Debate about Animal Language(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007); Will Abberley,English Fiction and the
Evolution of Language, 1850–1914, Cambridge Studies in
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, 101 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015).

55. Homi K. Bhabha,The Location of Culture(London: Routledge, 1994),
pp. 122, 89. On indigenous ‘copying’ of colonizers, see also, Michael
Taussig,Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses(New
York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 13–17. Luce Irigaray similarly argued that women
had been historically forced into ‘mimicry’ due to male dominance of discourse,
yet such female mimicry could also be subversive, challenging the supposed
naturalness of gender identities: see Luce Irigaray,This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. by Catherine Porter
and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 76.

57. 72Thomas Thiemeyer, ‘Work,
Specimen, Witness: How Different Perspectives on Museum Objects Alter the Way
They Are Perceived and the Values Attributed to Them’,Museum and Society, 13 (2015), 396–412 (pp. 402–03).

[1] * Laura Ugolini is a Professor of History, based at Wolverhampton City
Campus. Her research interests are in British gender history, particularly 19th
and early 20th century masculinities and male identities. In 2007 she published
Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain, 1880-1939, while her book
on Civvies: Middle-Class Men on the English Home Front, 1914-1918 was published
by Manchester University Press in 2013. Laura Ugolini directs the University of
Wolverhampton’s Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution (CHORD)